Nonesuch releases the first recording of John Adams‘s 2005 opera, Doctor Atomic, on June 29, 2018. Longtime Adams collaborator Peter Sellars created the libretto for Doctor Atomic, drawing from original sources. The composer leads the BBC Singers and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in this recording, which features a cast led by Gerald Finley, who originated the role of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer. Doctor Atomic is available to preorder now on iTunes and the Nonesuch Store, where the aria “Batter my heart” from Act I, Scene 3, and chorus “At the sight of this” from Act II, Scene 3, may be downloaded instantly; the two album tracks also may be streamed at Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and below via YouTube.
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Doctor Atomic concerns the final hours leading up to the first atomic bomb explosion at the Alamagordo test site in New Mexico in July 1945. The focal characters are the physicist and Manhattan Project director, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer; his wife Kitty; Edward Teller; and General Leslie Groves, US Army commander of the project.
Sellars’s libretto draws on original source material, including personal memoirs, recorded interviews, technical manuals of nuclear physics, declassified government documents, and the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, an American poet and contemporary of Oppenheimer.
Read more at John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic” First Recording Due June 29 on Nonesuch
